Article January 13, 1923 Issue

"Many inventions"

RUTH KELLER

In the first chapter of Genesis we read that God created everything and pronounced it by His all-wisdom "good." Then, since God's intelligence is all-inclusive, it must needs follow that He is absolutely ignorant of all the sinful and sick beliefs from which humanity is suffering. If God knew evil, as many suppose, and then destroyed it, He would destroy a part of Himself, for that of which God is conscious constitutes Being, for God is Mind. Mrs. Eddy tells us in "No and Yes" (p. 30): "He [God] need not know the evil He destroys, any more than the legislator need know the criminal who is punished by the law enacted. God's law is in three words, 'I am All;' and this perfect law is ever present to rebuke any claim of another law. God pities our woes with the love of a Father for His child,—not by becoming human, and knowing sin, or naught, but by removing our knowledge of what is not. He could not destroy our woes totally if He possessed any knowledge of them." Mortals are surely egotistical to believe in evil, which the infinite God, the only creator, knows not.

The question may arise, Where do sin, disease, and death come from, if God does not send them and knows them not? The confusion in the thought of mortals upon this topic has been caused by holding in thought the wrong concept of man. It is only the false belief in an existence separated from God, and in a mind capable of germinating such evil, which attracts error to error. Some one has truthfully said, "It is the evil that is within that invites and makes possible the attack from without." If we would only stop a minute, pause from the ways of mortals, and consider the wondrous works of God, pronounced "very good" by the infinite wisdom of Him who is "of purer eyes than to behold evil," we could catch a faint glimpse of man made in the image and likeness of Spirit, God.

The Preacher has said, "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions." Here is a clear explanation and statement of the fact that God has made man perfect, but that mortals have obscured the view of this glorious reality by the false belief that consciousness can consist of both good and evil. If each and every one constantly and conscientiously persisted in refusing to believe evil of every sort, and knew only the good, mortality with all its woes would cease; for sin, sickness, and death would no longer be credited as real by any one, and thus would not even seem to exist, since eradicated from consciousness. Then men would know only good, and see man only as God made him,—as individual, upright. When shall we all realize this great truth? Jesus of Nazareth beheld more clearly than any one else ever has "the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick" (Science and Health, p. 476). Jesus' spiritual vision saw only this spiritual, indestructible man. Thus was he enabled to say unto the man sick of the palsy, "Arise, take up thy bed," and unto the man with the withered hand, "Stretch forth thine hand;" and they did so instantaneously in response to the "correct view of man."

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